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Checking In: ServerHub 2015

We featured ServerHub in November 2014. At the time the fast-growing hosting company had made the Inc. 500/5000 list, coming in at 426, and was making plans to continue growth into 2015. Since we enjoy writing about our loyal readers and companies we interview, I thought it would be a great time to check in with John Brancela, CEO of ServerHub, and see what’s going on as we are approaching mid-year, just in time for HostingCon 2015.

Of course we’ll be doing a follow-up to HostingCon 2015, and will feature ServerHub among other industry leaders so we can bring first-hand knowledge of what’s happening, what’s trending, and what’s coming up in the hosting industry. And remember, we don’t just serve up hosting companies to our readers, we want to reach out to software, technology, and any related platform or industry that can benefit from picking up an issue of Ping! Zine. Now on to ServerHub.

ServerHub recently launched their Xeon D series dedicated servers. They still offer E3 and E5, two popular choices for serious customers, but with extensive testing and thorough research, ServerHub chose the Xeon D series as a way to help customers experience more powerful servers for their hosting needs. The Xeon D series does not replace the E3/E5 servers, instead offers the ability to expand memory to 128GB versus a limited 32GB. Here’s Brancela’s take on the new Xeon D series servers.

From what we’ve seen with the Xeon D, I must say it’s quite impressive. A lot of our customers especially in the VPS and Cloud market are looking for a product that is cost effective for them and can also deliver the power they need to run their business. The problem with the E3 has never been about the price; it’s been about the memory limitation of 32GB. The Xeon D not only delivers on the price point that our customers need but it removes the limitation of 32GB memory to 128GB which is a huge advancement for our customers.

Next up, I asked Brancela about SSDs and what hosting companies are doing to incorporate SSDs into their server portfolio. ServerHub has integrated SSDs into their product mix, but has the hosting industry shifted to SSDs or is the platform too costly for customers at this point?

I see that a lot of providers are starting to deploy SSDs into the market place, and we are seeing more of a demand for it from our customers as well. I think it does come down to cost vs capacity. You have some customers who are very interested in SSD because of performance but they are a little worried about the reduced storage. Then on the other side of the spectrum we have customers who aren’t really too concerned about the performance but they want “big data” type of space.

On the flip side however, we have long recommended SSDs and have been first to market SSDs back in the early part of the decade, because the increased I/O was such a big benefit, it still is today and will continue to be for a long time to come.

With Xeon D dedicated servers and SSDs at the ready, where will ServerHub rack all these new servers? With expansion in mind, Brancela quickly responded on the company’s growth into new data centers and building out an international presence, starting with US expansion and then a debut in Europe.

We have a lot of expansion planned and it’s actually very exciting for us. We saw a lot of growth in 2014, and 2015 hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. We are currently continuing our expansion into the Dallas, TX market and have operations in two data centers there, including transit connectivity in the famed InfoMart facility. We have about another half dozen locations that we have set our eyes on for Q3 and Q4 2015 which includes Chicago, IL and New York, NY area. Shortly thereafter we will be making an exciting debut into the European market.

As a fast-growing hosting provider, we want to know what’s trending this year in the hosting industry. Brancela covered several topics, starting with two hot topics – big data and the cloud – two areas of growth that are changing the hosting landscape.

Big Data will continue to be a big driver as mass storage arrays and cloud continue to make a shift. I definitely continue seeing Bare Metal servers continuing to have an important part in the market place, but things are definitely shifting into the “Cloud” space.

To accommodate customer requests for big data and cloud hosting needs, ServerHub launched some great plans including their IronGrid VPS Servers which include Pure SSD and Big Data.

The amount of storage you can use on these servers is enormous, but stepping into things a little further and talking about really big data, we are working on some Hadoop offerings and other massive arrays of storage that our customers can use for all their big data needs.

That brings us to the cloud and what ServerHub is doing to move customers to a cloud platform for maximum performance.

We have a number of initiatives that we are working on right now that will completely revolutionize what we are doing in the cloud industry. While we continue our development on the true cloud front, we have developed some of the fastest I/O Cloud VPS servers in the industry. Beating some of our top competitors in the industry, most of our VPS offerings feature over 1.3G/sec of sustained I/O.

Finally, we want to know if the hosting industry changed over the last year so we asked Brancela what he sees as the most significant or most impactful changes are taking place.

We are continuing to see a shift in the Cloud space for sure, more and more Enterprise customers are wanting to use cloud platforms to not only virtualize a lot of current systems, they are always using it for Disaster Recovery. Data loss is a big thing that nobody likes to talk about, and it does happen and it’s a serious issue. Enterprise customers are certainly reacting and they are utilizing the shift in technology to protect their assets.

Watch for ServerHub in the coming months as they continue their rapid growth. Check out their website at www.serverhub.com.